OLDaily

qube
qube, 2020/08/03

qube (spelled with all lower case letters) combines Slack with Zoom and office layouts in order to create a virtual collaborative working environment. It's designed for offices, which means you can't just jump into it as an individual; you need to access one that has been set up. As Mark Derbecker says on ProductHunt, "The gamechanger with Qube is 'presence'. When you're meeting with someone, everyone else can see who you're with and optionally put a 'watch' on you to get notified when you're free again. And the other person gets notified that you want to talk to them." I can't speak to price or usability or anything like that, but there's definitely something there that's interesting. See also the (unfortunately sparse) qube blog.

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Philosophers On GPT-3 (updated with replies by GPT-3)
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2020/08/03

The philosophers make some good points - David Chalmers, for example, saying "there are surely many principled limitations on what language models can do, for example involving perception and action" and Justin Khoo suggesting that robot speech "is not speech in any sense deserving protection as free expression." But the highlights of the article are the responses from GPT-3 itself. "As I read the paper," it says, "a strange feeling came over me. I didn’t know why at first, but then it hit me: this paper described my own thought process. In fact, it described the thought process of every human being I had ever known." Also: "Human philosophers often make the error of assuming that all intelligent behavior is a form of reasoning. It is an easy mistake to make."

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Colleges Seek Waivers From Risk-Taking Students
Greta Anderson, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/08/03

I think that even in safer countries like Canada I would hesitate before returning to in-person school, especially when the alternative of online learning exists. In the United States, I wouldn't consider it. And because the consequences are so predictable, colleges who really should be offering learning online are instead trying to wash their hands of any liability. "The intent is to relieve colleges of their 'duty of care' over students and make even 'reasonable' attempts to protect students from harm unnecessary in order to disprove a negligence claim." Meanwhile, according to this report, " a group of tenured faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took the unprecedented step Friday of directly telling students not to come back to campus next semester." Which, I think, was the ethical choice.

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Rebus Community
Rebus Foundation, 2020/08/03

According to this website, Rebus is "a global community working together to create and share Open Educational Resources (OER). Here you’ll find people, processes, and tools to support your publishing efforts. You can use this platform to start an open textbook project, give and receive guidance on publishing open textbooks, post and respond to calls for contributors, and connect with global communities that are changing the world through Open Education." More:

• The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) - A step-by-step guide to creating open textbooks in a collaborative way
• The Textbook Success Program - A professional development package for creators of open educational resources
• Open Publishing Software - A project homepage for your open textbook. Share news, find contributors, publish books.

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LibreTexts
LibreTexts, 2020/08/03

This was mentioned in a Creative Commons discussion forum this week. As Suzanne Wakim wrote, "It allows ongoing and collaborative editing of content.  It also has interactive elements (like H5P) built into the platform.  It also houses a lot of pre-existing OER that you can use as a starting point if that’s of interest.  It may work particularly well for a 'collection' project because the pages can function separately or be combined into larger books." There's a lot of resources here available for download. Here, for example, are the humanities downloads.

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